By Eric Cole
We went to Costa Rica for a week in early March. Modern travel still amazes me, how you can basically go from winter to summer in a matter of hours, and be as blasé about it as the hop from jeans to shorts.
Anyway, we stayed in a remote jungle lodge on the Osa Penninsula, where macaws and monkeys
were the nosiest residents. Though adjacent to Corcovado National Park, access to the
interior of the park turned out to be very restricted, which was disappointing at the time,
but in retrospect I suppose is a good thing , if this significant chunk of primary rainforest
is to be preserved intact.
We still saw a good variety of wildlife, including tapir, tamandua, coati, and three
species of primates. Calls from the aptly named Howler monkeys erupted from the
dark throat of the jungle to a deep growling chorus an hour before dawn every day.
How such a beautiful creature can produce such a terrifying sound is just an extreme
example of advertising one’s presence in the dense jungle.
An iconic resident we missed was the sloth, which for reasons not understood yet, has
mysteriously disappeared from the area in the last couple of years. We went on a night
tour and saw a number of reptiles, amphibians and insects that hide during the day but
whose huge eyes enable a nocturnal existence. It was nice to see bats flying around at
dusk, a sight sorely missed at home thanks to Whitenose syndrome, a fungus that affects
hibernating bats that has wiped out ninety percent of our resident bat species in recent years.
Birds were not as evident as I had hoped but it is always challenging to see birds in forest
habitats anyway. To locate a bird that’s singing in the trees can require waiting patiently for
some movement in the leaves to get eyes on it. Meanwhile you are at the mercy of any
biting bugs in the vicinity. In Canada you can be virtually swarmed by mosquitoes if you
pause like this in the summer. Not so much in Costa Rica, at least in the dry season.
What a treat to be able to ramble through the jungle without constantly swatting away
pesky biters. Not to say there are not bugs, there are all kinds of ants, spiders and
other insects of course, just not in the concentrations we get in our woods. Our short
season means a more condensed proliferation of life which provides a bounty for insect
eaters and explains why millions of birds migrate from the tropics to our northern
climes every year. Our summer bug buffet enables them to raise two broods of chicks a
year, which in some cases means six to ten kids a year, a return they could never enjoy
if they stayed in the tropics to breed where food is more dispersed.
It can be disconcerting though, to see some of our familiar birds in the tropics. They
behave so differently on their wintering grounds and during migration that they can be
hard to recognize. I walked under a tree full of Baltimore Orioles, feeding together on
the fruit, not a chirp out of any of them. Eastern Kingbirds, in Canada so belligerent
and territorial, form subdued flocks of mutual tolerance as they migrate up through
Central America. A warbler or a vireo would suddenly appear silently combing the
undergrowth for food to fuel their return north. All of these neo-tropical migrants will
be heading our way soon, and when they get here will once again express themselves
in the full colour and song that we are used to.
